By Olivia Ronsain
Among all the tech news I’ve read recently, one piece really caught my eye – a preliminary study on the damaging effect of sperm’s prolonged exposure to Wi-Fi via a laptop, published in the journal Fertility and Sterility.
Working in tech PR, I paid particular attention to the news that this warning message – ‘The use of a Wi-Fi connection can damage your sperm cells’ – could soon appear on the underside of a modem, and it got me thinking. How exactly will parents tell their teenage sons that surfing the net with their laptop resting on their knees could harm their ability to have children one day?
It’s hard to picture a mother casually telling her son, “Sweetie, I already told you not to put your laptop directly on your knees. Do you really want to suffer reduced sperm motility and a fragmentation of its DNA?”
This study is just the latest in a long line of research reports that have found a regular place in our news cycles. For instance, the Health Protection Agency (HPA) previously warned that a 20 minute call on a mobile phone and a whole year in a Wi-Fi hot-spot, exposed users to the same amount of radio waves. The question is, has anyone paid attention and adapted their mobile habits?
Carried out by scientists from Argentina and the US, this Wi-Fi fertility study has certainly raised a few eyebrows – especially among the male of the species! And, given that previous reports suggested infertility worries were a result of the heat generated from laptops, there’s certainly some merit in these findings.
However, with the HPA already closely monitoring the safety of Wi-Fi, wouldn’t it have been better to wait for some stronger confirmation before publishing news like this and proposing health warnings be stamped across pieces of kit?
Should the effects of Wi-Fi be proved true, then men will surely take note and adapt their posture (or risk the consequences). I doubt that modem warnings will make much of a difference.
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